1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer processing and, more specifically, to systems and methods for comparing electronic objects to identify differences.
2. Background Information
In many fields of endeavor, numerous electronic objects, such as files, are often created. During the course of designing and building a new product or system, for example, large numbers of objects are typically created, revised, edited, and sometimes deleted, thereby generating multiple versions of each object. In particular, computer program files may be created and then updated as new features are added, errors are corrected, and old features are removed. Data files may be created and then modified as new data is acquired. In addition, two files may start out as identical copies, but diverge as they are updated and changed by different people or processes.
Oftentimes, managers and others are interested in evaluating the changes that have been made to an object from one version to the next. To determine the differences between two files, a differencing process is performed. A differencing process analyzes two or sometimes three files, and produces a technical description of the differences between or among them. The UNIX operating system, for example, includes a utility known as diff that compares the contents of two files. To run the diff utility, a user enters the diff command at a Command Line Interface (CLI) along with the names of the files. The Windows® operating system from Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash. includes a similar utility called windiff that determines the differences between ASCII files.